Sharp's first polemical text, written in the latter days of his Lancashire work and whilst subsequently unemployed. Written in Liverpool, Preston and Ashington it was 'a book directed towards the creation of idealised towns, as well as the preservation and enhancement of our countryside, was mainly written among the most debased urban and rural environments in England.' (Chronicles of Failure, p.181).
Sharp's concern was with the desecration of the countryside and also, as he saw it, the debasement of the town. The fate of the countryside was a common cause of the period, as motor traffic allows the ugliness hitherto largely associated with and confined to the industrial town to spill out into the countryside. However, for Sharp the problems of the countryside's future were inextricably linked with the future of the town. Urban areas had lost urbanity, according to Sharp, due to Victorian industrialism and capitalism but also, controversially, because of the planning response of garden cities and their suburban progeny;
Tradition has broken down. Taste is utterly debased. There is no enlightened guidance or correction from authority. The town, long since degraded, is now being annihilated by a flabby, shoddy, romantic nature-worship. That romantic nature-worship is destroying also the object of its adoration, the countryside. Both are being destroyed. The one age-long certainty, the antithesis of town and country, is already breaking down. Two diametrically opposed, dramatically contrasting, inevitable types of beauty are being displaced by one drab, revolting neutrality. Rural influences neutralize the town. Urban influences neutralize the country. In a few years all will be neutrality. The strong, masculine virility of the town; the softer beauty, the richness, the hat mother of men the countryside, will be debased into one sterile, hermaphroditic beastliness (p.11).
The first section of the book addressed the country; encompassing ideas of landscape, buildings in landscape, country roads and the idea of country reserves (similar to subsequent country parks). He discusses how essentially all British landscape is the work of man (and claimed in Chronicles of Failure to be the first to do this). He prefigured the idea of national parks and, much later a focus on countryside character, by discussing how there was a preoccupation with upland landscapes to the detriment of the protection of more typical lowland countryside. In discussing the importance of familiar buildings in landscape he introduced an unattributed partial quotation, 'For a nation without a past and without everyday evidences of it, is "as dull to live with as a man without a memory"' (p.38). In the section on villages he introduced typologies, using real and theoretical examples. He had no time for planned 'accidental' picturesqueness or spontaneity, drawing parallels with Sitte; 'Camillo Sitte saw in picturesque 'natural' medieval towns a beauty that he could not find in later architectural uniformity.
He set out directly to copy in modern cities the irregularities, the fumblings, the purposeless staggerings of those old towns. Where the old builders did not plan at all he planned an imitation of their lack of planning - with such lamentable results that the whole of his theory stood condemned by his works within a few years. 'Of all artificiality the most barren and depressing is the conscious imitation of the unconscious and "natural"' (p.66). Essentially Sharp's preference was for a gentle formality. Most of the section on countryside still has resonance but there are some sections that are anachronisms of their time, such as how to plan a chicken farm.
The section on the country was followed by a short 'Interlude' on matters of amenity such as smoke, spoil heaps, river pollution, overhead wires, advertisements, litter, noise and general tidiness.
This led on to the second major part of the book, 'the town'. Prominent in this was a savaging of Howard's 'Garden Cities of Tomorrow' (this was introduced by saying that it has been of great influence - 'certainly a far greater influence than did Camillo Sitte's famous 'Der Stadtbau' or than will the much-discussed frenzied theatricality that Le Corbusier has entitled 'The City of Tomorrow'' [p.140]). The essence of the argument was that the correct response to the horrors of the Victorian city should have been ideas about how to improve it rather than abandon it. He mocked Howard's preoccupation with town 'evils' such as gin palaces. He lambasted the concept of Howard's idea of marriage of town and country as 'Town-Country' as being 'a hermaphrodite; sterile, imbecile, a monster; abhorrent and loathsome to the Nature which he worships' (p.143). He lamented how garden city low density ideas had been encapsulated in planning legislation and in the profession. He was also brutal about garden-city suburbs of Paris as well as savaging 'one of the most eminent garden-city practitioners in the country, a past-president of the Institute' (p.160) for his reformulation of Edinburgh New Town on garden-city lines. He argued for a return to urbanity and for the importance of the street.
In establishing principles for town growth, perhaps ironically given what had come before, he advocated the creation of new smaller settlements of the same sort of population size as suggested by Howard (Sharp concluded 30-150,000 is optimum); though emphatically with a different urban form. There followed chapters on urban roads and transport and urban open spaces. The transport chapter displayed Sharp's ability to forensically critique existing standards but had no real original prescriptions. Similarly, the urban open space chapter demonstrated the almost random variability of open space standards then promoted and, amongst other things, included an attack on the naturalistic designs of Victorian public parks; particular contempt being directed at Buttes-Chamont in Paris. The desire for orderliness was summed up by an attack on allotments (though not the principle of their existence) 'How the primitive abandonment of dilapidated bacon-and-orangebox hen-pens and tool-sheds can still be tolerated in and around nearly every town in the kingdom is an amazing thing when it is considered how easy it would be to arrange an orderly and systematic lay-out. But this is only one more example of the slatternliness that is so characteristic of much of our modern life' (p.212).
The book finished with a brief discussion of the circumstances of how good places are created; through democracy or autocracy. Though autocracy had perhaps the better track-record, democracy was seen to have some potential, but then Sharp turned to have a final lengthy swipe at all concerned with the creation and operation of the planning system of the time.